Faith Is A Talent, And

We Have A Huge Institution That Celebrates The Undistinguished, An Institution Which Is Nearly As Old As The Papists. It's Been Going On For Millennia. What Else Is A Monarchy But A Series Of Ridiculously Exalted Figures Who Are Not Necessarily Distinguished At All? In Fact, They Have A Rather Philistine Tradition. So Perhaps We Are More Vulnerable To It Than Other Countries.

The Process Of Writing A Novel Begins With A Pang, A Moment Of Recognition, And A Situation, A Character, Or Something You Read In A Paper, That Seems To Go Off, Like A Solar Flare Inside Your Head.

There's Chile And There's Uruguay, And No One Quite Knows Why Uruguay Is So Appealingly Selfless Because They've Had Their Terror And Their Revolution Like All The Rest. But Somehow, There's Something In Them.

The Trouble With Life Is Its Amorphousness, Its Ridiculous Fluidity. Look At It: Thinly Plotted, Largely Themeless, Sentimental And Ineluctably Trite. The Dialogue Is Poor, Or At Least Violently Uneven. The Twists Are Either Predictable Or Sensationalist. And It’s Always The Same Beginning, And The Same Ending.

No Novel Has Ever Changed Anything, As Far As I Can See.